Right Angle began as a column in the now-defunct Sunday magazine in November 1991. The column allowed me the luxury of presenting an alternative to the prevailing left-liberal consensus in India. It has become the implicit signature tune for all my subsequent writings.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

In the winter of 1979, Britain was devastated by a wave of strikes. The lorry drivers stopped plying their vehicles and this instantly led to all round shortages; the railway employees went on many wildcat 24 hours strikes, leaving passengers in the wrong place at the wrong time; the dustmen struck work and garbage piled up on the streets; and, to cap it all, the gravediggers decided they too needed pay hikes and took industrial action, causing a lot of grief to the families of the deceased.

At that time, James Callaghan was the British Prime Minister. Increasingly helpless, he went off to the Caribbean resort of Guadeloupe for a summit meeting. Returning in the middle of the lorry driver’s strike he was asked by a reporter how he reacted to the prevailing chaos in the country. “Well”, replied Callaghan ponderously, “that’s a judgment that you are making...I don’t think that other people… would share the view that there is mounting chaos.”

It was an answer that would have been appreciated by the likes of All India Radioand Doordarshan. Fortunately, the tabloids, for all their smuttiness, have kept the flag of irreverence flying high. And so it was next morning when the one and only Sun ran the famous headline: “Crisis? What crisis?”

These three words were enough to deflate the British Prime Minister. Within five months, the Labour Party and Callaghan were mocked out of office.

It is a pity that the Indian media, by and large, continues to be respectful of the worthies who insist on living in a make-believe world. In the aftermath of Standard & Poor (S&P) downgrading the outlook for India from stable to negative and the International Monetary Fund making clear its concerns “about governance and slow project approvals” by the Indian Government, economists have rushed in where investors fear to tread. Predicting that the GDP growth will still be around 7.5 per cent rather than the projected 6.9 per cent, the Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, one of the perfectly meaningless bodies that the system loves throwing up, asserted that “Some concerns expressed by S&P will also be resolved during this year.” On his part, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia told a shrinking community of India optimists in London that the Government needed to undertake precious little macro-economic adjustment beyond fulfilling its commitment to reduce the deficit to the Budgetary target of 5.1 per cent. “The big news”, he said with a straight face, “is in Asia, in India and China. I expect people will do their sums and put the money where the growth is.”

The problem with many economists is that they view money as an abstraction. Had Dr C.Rangarajan and Ahluwalia interacted a little more closely with those who actually handle money on behalf of mutual fund investors, pension funds and other entities, they would have discovered that their words of reassurance have precious little meaning.

The mood among those who invested heavily in India over the past two decades is turning ugly. In Hong Kong and Singapore, where I interacted with fund managers and analysts over the past week, there is a growing India fatigue. As exasperation and frustration is replaced by gallows humour, the concern is how cleverly the investing classes can cut their losses and run. Many of those invested in India have narrowed their focus to purely defensive positions and withdrawn from companies whose future is linked with the regulatory regime and dealings with the government. More to the point, they have reduced their mind space on India and have shifted their interest back to Thailand, Indonesia and, of course, China.

In Mumbai, where the financial community doesn’t have the luxury of diversions, the mood is near suicidal. The optimists are clutching at straw and the realists are reconciled to raw. In January, for example, the markets staged a brief rally purely on the strength of half-baked rumours that a good performance of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh would herald a renewed reforming zeal. What is important is not that the expectations were unreal but that the markets were responding to purely political signals.

Unlike the 2007 crisis which was occasioned by happenings beyond the control of India, the gloom and doom of today is located purely in the political paralysis that has affected the Centre for two years. The Congress can blame coalition pressures and an obstreperous opposition but the grim reality is that is the policy incoherence and the eroding clout of the Prime Minister that is responsible for the mess. The likes of Rangarajan and Ahluwalia can try and talk up the economy and the markets by pointing to India’s inherent potential and the determination of the PMO to remove bottlenecks. What the investing classes are, however, witnessing is the sad fact that the political executive no longer has the capacity to do anything meaningful.

There are two centres of power (or powerlessness) in the Congress, and both have lost the ability to push their agenda. They have created a void in which bodies like the Supreme Court, the CAG, the Ministry of Environment and even public sector units such as Coal India have stepped in. Rather than an orchestra, India resembles a cacophony of musicians doing their own thing and yet pretending that the noise generated is music.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Liberal and ‘progressive’ opinion has been inclined
to view the question of states’ rights with both suspicion and distaste. To a
very large extent this wariness has originated from the themes that divided the
Union and the Confederacy in the American Civil War some 150 years ago. In the
popular imagination, states’ rights is seen as a platform of bigotry and
associated with either slave owners or politicians such as Strom Thurmond and
George Wallace who did their utmost to prevent the passage of Civil Rights
legislation. By implication, the opposition to excessive autonomy for states of
Union have become associated with forces intent on top-down social engineering
to rectify local wrongs. Over time, the issue of states’ rights have also influenced
the recurring disputes between big government and small government—an issue
that has resonated in the grassroots activism of the Tea Party.

That India and the US have different experiences
with Constitution making is not in doubt. The US initially came into being as a
consequence of individual states joining the Union in a voluntary federation.
The Republic of India, despite being a nominal ‘Union of States’, evolved as
the successor regime of British India (minus the parts that made up Pakistan).
To this was added the many hundred Princely States whose rulers signed the
Instrument of Accession and were effortlessly subsumed into the new Republic.
With the states being regarded as mere administrative units, there was a basis
to B.R. Ambedkar’s assertion in the Constituent Assembly that the Constitution
did not acknowledge any right of secession. If the Union had created the
states, how could the states see themselves as founder members with a right to
withdraw?

The Constitutional denial of secession is worth
reiterating if only to set at rest the uninformed fear that the recent
political battles over federalism in India are a precursor to the weakening and
eventual disintegration of the Indian Union. Admittedly this was a lurking fear
in the first two decades after Independence but following the creation of a
national market, the rise in inter-state mobility and the unifying effects of
the media, Bollywood and cricket, the fear of India coming apart has virtually
become a non-issue. It would be preposterous to suggest that those in the
forefront of the demand to review Centre-state relations harbour separatist
ambitions. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the recent political strains between
the non-Congress-ruled states and the Centre have not been accompanied by
sectarian strains involving locals and outsiders.

The movement for more equitable federal relations
has undergone a profound change since the last years of Indira Gandhi’s
Government. In those days, much of the controversy centred on the powers of the
Governor and the partisan use of Article 356 to dismiss state governments. It
was primarily these political concerns that led to the appointment of the
Sarkaria Commission to review the whole gamut of Centre-state relations.

The Sarkaria report and the Supreme Court judgment
in the S.R. Bommai case succeeded in substantially preventing the misuse of the
Centre’s discretionary powers. While many states continue to be unhappy with
the Centre’s de-facto veto over state legislation—witness the fury of Gujarat
over the Centre’s persistent refusal to approve its anti-terror bill—it would
be fair to say that the debate has shifted to the more pressing issue of fiscal
powers.

What has triggered this move is India’s economic
growth. The rapid growth of the country’s Gross Domestic Product since the
process of liberalisation began in 1991. In recent years, the gross tax
revenues of the country as a whole have increased exponentially. In 1960-61, it
amounted to 7.8 per cent of GDP, and rose to 15.5 per cent in 1990-91 and 18.6
per cent in 2008-09. In the corresponding period, the tax revenues of the
states was 2.6 per cent of GDP in 1960-61, 5.3 per cent in 1990-91 and 6.3 per
cent in 2008-09. In short, while the exchequers of the states have swelled, their
growth has not been commensurate with the phenomenal expansion in the tax
revenues of the Centre. By 2010-11, the total receipts of the Centre amounted
to 16 per cent of the GDP. The Centre has been the principal beneficiary of
India’s growing prosperity.

The associated outcome of the burgeoning of the
Centre’s kitty has been the United Progressive Alliance’s endorsement of
mega-welfarism. Under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi the Centre did experiment
with modest anti-poverty projects. On its part, the National Democratic
Alliance threw its weight behind schemes to upgrade India’s creaking
infrastructure. The Manmohan Singh Government, backed by the political clout of
Congress President Sonia Gandhi, has shed modesty and embraced projects on a
scale never witnessed before. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment
Guarantee scheme covers the whole country and the proposed Food Security Bill
is aimed at providing subsidised foodgrain to every family reckoned to be below
the poverty line. In addition, the annual Plan outlay rose to Rs 5,92,457 crore
in the Budget of 2011-12. Of this Plan expenditure, nearly one-third was meant
for social services and rural development.

The Cabinet Mission proposal that the Centre should
confine itself to defence, public finance, foreign policy and communications
was never accepted by the Congress. However, today’s enlarged Centre is
increasingly viewing itself as the only motor of state intervention, including
involvement in spheres that are the preserves of the state governments. The
Constitution-makers had envisaged that a redistributive Centre should aid the
states through a revenue sharing process determined by the Finance Commission.
Today, however, more than 60 per cent of the disbursement is being done through
the Planning Commission, a body that was created outside the Constitution in
1950.

The growing powers of the Planning Commission have
meant that expenditure by the states comes with strings attached and is in line
with the priorities of the Centre. The MNREG scheme, for example, is thought to
be superfluous by the state governments in Punjab, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. Yet,
they are obliged to participate in it. Successful food security schemes are
already operational in Chhattisgarh and Orissa. Now both these states are
confronted with the possibility of local initiatives being supplanted by a
Central scheme based on the one-size-fits-all principle.

The move towards homogeneity is fuelling resentment
in the states. India is a diverse country with vastly different levels of
development. By attempting to mould development according to an architecture
drawn up in Delhi, the Centre is creating distortions and fuelling waste and
inefficiency. It is not that the states don’t want additional resources: they
are seeking local controls over the pattern of expenditure.

Politically, the idea of a Federal Front has got a
fillip with the steady decline of the two national parties. However, the
opposition to an over-intrusive Centre is yet to be crystallised around
definite demands. In the coming days this is bound to be rectified. It is
possible to envisage a situation where the forthcoming debate on federalism is
likely to be along two broad lines.

First, there is likely to be a demand for the
primacy of the Finance Commission in the matter of resource allocation. By
implication this will entail a considerable dilution in the powers of the
Planning Commission and the emergence of empowered state planning bodies.
Secondly, the distribution of powers between the Centre and states will sooner
or later have to be renegotiated keeping in mind the growing importance of
market forces.

The general election
of 2014 could be the trigger for a shift of the political centre of gravity.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Speaking to a TV channel from Washington DC last
Friday, the Government’s Chief Economic Adviser Kaushik Basu expressed his
bewilderment that his “mandane” comments on the Indian economy to a Carnegie
Endowment-organised meeting had triggered a huge controversy. He wondered if he
had unwittingly stumbled into a dull news day and helped keep the ticker
rolling.

A part of Basu’s consternation is understandable. He
will not be the first public figure to be concerned about what one senior
politician once described to me in private as the “media illiteracy” on
economic subjects. His erudite proffering on the likelihood of a European
banking crisis in 2014, quite understandably, attracted little attention.
However, since the talk was on “India’s Economy and the Looming Crisis Global
Economic Crisis of 2014” and he occupies the post of Chief Economic Adviser, it
is hardly surprising that the media reportage was focussed on what he had to
say about India.

If Basu had decided to don the mantle of the Deputy
Chairman of the Planning and act as the permanent defence counsel for the
Government he is serving, he could have escaped unscathed. He could well have
set intellectual honesty to one side and argued that India remains reform
obsessed and that it all depends on what we mean by reforms. He could
conceivably have taken a cue from Minister of State Jyotiraditya Scindia who
haughtily told a TV channel that it was India which was complaining and that
Bharat was delighting in the entitlement-based policies of the UPA.

Fortunately Basu has not been too long in sarkari
service to completely disregard his formidable reputation as an economist and a
man of letters. If media reports are correct, he told the gathering in
Washington three things. First, that decision-making in a coalition had taken
the steam out of reforms. Secondly, that it was unlikely that there would be any
big-ticket reforms before 2014, the Goods and Services Tax being the only
possible exception. And finally, he expressed the hope that a return of
one-party government could be the biggest fillip to reform.

It is not necessary to be either a UPA-hater or a
Congress lover to admit that what Basu said is conventional wisdom. Yet, what
he said was only half the story. For reasons of tact, Basu left many things
unsaid.

A closer scrutiny of what is meant by coalitional
constraints is revealing. The fact that Mamata Banerjee has proved a very
difficult coalition partner, preventing much-needed fare hikes in the Railways
and helping to derail the opening up of the retail sector as a whole to foreign
direct investment, is well known. It is also a subject that Congress loyalists
aren’t wary of addressing in private and even in public. What the Government
is, however, less enthusiastic about admitting is the fact that the opposition
to reforms doesn’t come from obstreperous coalition partners and a cussed
opposition alone. The Congress is split down the middle over the priority to be
accorded to reforms.

It is worthwhile recalling that what clinched the
roll-back of the retail sector reforms earlier this year was not merely the
opposition of the Trinamool Congress and DMK, but the quiet but determined
opposition from the Congress’ own backbenches. The average Congress MP, brought
up on a diet of Nehruvian socialism where the state sector propels change, was
suspicious of the very idea that large corporations (with foreign capital) can
usher efficiency in agricultural change. To them, that initiative rests with
bodies such as the Food Corporation of India and NAFED. The Congress is
inherently statist in its orientation and will be unenthusiastic about reforms
that involve opening up sectors to all-round, including global, competition. This
explains its foot-dragging in reforms connected to pensions, insurance and
banking. It even explains why a stupendous amount of public money is being
expended on keeping a vanity public sector airline afloat.

Manmohan Singh succeeded in pushing through a large
measure of deregulation between 1992 and 1995 for two reasons. First, because
in 1991 India was confronted with an economic crisis that forced a change of
direction. Secondly, he had the full backing of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha
Rao who extended full political support to him.

Today, the feeling in the Government is that the GDP
growth is healthy enough to not be coerced into doing things that go against
the instincts of the party. Secondly, it would not be an exaggeration to say
that neither Sonia Gandhi nor her successor see reforms as the priority. Their
stress is creating a welfare state based on entitlements and they are least
concerned with issues of affordability. The most discredited facets of the
post-War European experience are being sought to be imported into India.

In 1992, India charted a new course with an
entrepreneur-driven trajectory of growth. In the past seven years, an attempt
has been made to turn the clock back and revert to state-driven stagnation.

The Government of Manmohan Singh is confronted with
political schizophrenia. A minusculity wants to keep the faith of 1992 but the
political forces that drive the regime would rather go back to the regime of
high taxes, high interest rates, deficit financing and high government spending—bound
together by the repudiation of the federal ethos. It is not the Manmohan spirit
that is prevailing but the Sonia consensus.

Why are men of
integrity like Kaushik Basu wasting their time on such a self-destructive
venture?

The conference of Chief Ministers last Monday to
discuss internal security was marked by a spectacular degree of discord between
the Centre and the states. An explanation for this trust deficit may indeed lie
in partisan politics. However, when formidable state leaders charge New Delhi
of viewing the provinces as mere municipalities and question the rationale of
the Centre’s intrusiveness in subjects ranging from internal security to
environment and anti-poverty schemes, there are grounds to probe the likelihood
of an emerging Constitutional breakdown. Has the “cooperative federalism” the
Founding Fathers crafted in 1950 passed its sell-by date?

The question is neither heretical nor insolent.
Political documents—and the Indian Constitution is a political document—are
rooted in a context. In 1947, the members of the Constituent Assembly addressed
their mission with multiple dreams but total clarity on two counts.

First, they were deeply suspicious of any federal
scheme that advocated a minimal Centre and strong states. This wariness stemmed
almost entirely from the Congress experience with the Pakistan movement and the
stand taken by the Chamber of Princes in the debates on the federation that was
supposed to take the 1935 Constitution to its logical conclusion. With Mohammed
Ali Jinnah and the Princes out of the way, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Government
imagined that state’s rights were no longer a paramount issue. A strong,
paramount Centre was the consensus of the political class in 1947.

Secondly, flowing from its earnest commitment to the
unity and integrity of the new India, the Constituent Assembly was equally in
love with centralised planning. This wasn’t exclusively an infatuation with the
Soviet Union. Many Congress leaders were sold on President Roosevelt’s New Deal
in the US and the welfarist impulses of the Labour Party in Britain. They
sought to replicate some of the achievements on both sides of the Atlantic in
India.

In his seminal work on the making of the Indian
Constitution, Granville Austin has documented the remarkable extent to which
members of Nehru’s Cabinet were anxious to place all crucial subjects on the
Central list. Jagjivan Ram wanted labour legislation to be dictated from Delhi;
Rajkumari Amrit Kaur imagined that public health was too important a subject to
be left to provincial politicians; and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was of the view
that education should be a Central subject so that the “intelligentsia of the
country will be thinking on similar lines.”

The centralising impulses of the Nehruvian Congress
finally coalesced in the establishment of the Planning Commission in March
1950. Although this body wasn’t mentioned in the Constitution, it soon evolved
into what Sardar Patel feared would be a “superbody”, dictating the terms of
national development to the states. Apart from viewing states as subordinate
bodies to the Centre, the Planning Commission was premised on the belief that a
few well-meaning and politically driven experts could draw a blueprint for the
whole nation.

Austin described Indian planning as ‘intellectual
centralisation”. In hindsight he was guilty of understatement. Over the years,
the Planning Commission has overshadowed the Constitutionally-approved Finance
Commission and the National Development Council. It has repudiated diversity,
marginalised entrepreneurship and become an instrument of political control.
The sight of popularly elected Chief Ministers lining up before the Deputy
Chairman of the Commission to get their state plans approved is profoundly
humiliating and calculated to make states appear like beggars. The
we-give-the-money syndrome has, indeed, become a hallmark of the Gandhi
family’s speeches.

There was a time when the same political party ran
the governments at the Centre and the states. The Constitution-makers and the
Nehruvian consensus never imagined a situation when this would not be so. Nor
could they envisage a future when the intellectual fashions of the 1950s and
1960s would be junked and even placed among history’s bad ideas. The
over-centralised features of the Constitution reflected their belief in their
own infallibility.

It is time these fundamentals
were questioned by a new breed of Indians who combine Indian-ness with an
equally fierce pride in the vernaculars. A Constitution is not a holy book. As
India becomes more self-confident and federal at the same time, it may be time
to review the sanctity it has accorded to an Imperial Centre.

Friday, April 20, 2012

There are few politicians who have made the journey
from the sublime to the ridiculous in so short a time as West Bengal’s Mamata
Banerjee. A year ago, as the well-entrenched Left Front Government floundered,
the leader of the Trinamool Congress emerged as a Mother Goddess, hell bent on
slaying the Marxist demons who had intimidated an entire people for three
decades.

It is not that everyone regarded Mamata as the
perfect avenger. Her temperamental ways, her inability to treat colleagues as
equals and her determination to wage total war on her opponents regardless of
the issues did arouse fears. However, since taking on the CPI(M) unflinchingly
and unwaveringly for a sustained period required exceptional determination,
Bengalis were inclined to allow Mamata an exceptional degree of license. After
all, it was said, you had to be slightly crazy to take on the Left in an
apparently unequal war.

A Bengal that elected Mamata with a staggering
majority in May last year was always a bit wary of her ability to make the
transition from rebel to Chief Minister. However, the fact that she came to
power on the crest of popular goodwill, the blessings of the middle classes,
the unequivocal support of the Muslim minority and even the endorsement of the
over-unionised labour suggested that her ‘poriborton’ (change) journey would
involve a balanced approach. Above all, the real expectation from Mamata was
that she would put an end to the petty tyranny of the CPI(M)’s fabled ‘cadre
raj’. In short, having experimented with quasi-radicalism for 35 years, Mamata
would strive to steer West Bengal in the direction of normal politics. West
Bengal was tired of being the permanent contrarian.

It has taken less than a year for disappointment to
overwhelm the state. Far from abandoning reckless populism and getting down to
the serious business of governance, Didi appears to frittering away her
energies in trivial pursuits. Whether it is the curious decision to paint large
parts of Kolkata blue, a silly prosecution of a middle class professor who had
forwarded a cartoon on email and her diktat to her supporters to shun all
social contacts with CPI(M) supporters, Mamata has focussed attention on her
eccentric ways. Coupled with her peremptory treatment of party colleagues who
dared to be a little different, she seems hell bent on making governance in
West Bengal over the next four years a Mad Hatter’s Party.

The natural rebel in Mamata appears to have snuffed
out her momentary inclination to emerge as a statesman, with one finger in
national politics. It is true that the local media, particularly that section
which endorsed her enthusiastically in her battle against the Left Front, has
been merciless in the attacks on her. But far from viewing criticism as a
wake-up call, a beleaguered Mamata has been quick to detect conspiracies. Why
the rape of a girl in a posh area of Kolkata or the assault of a college
principal in North Bengal should be evidence of a monumental gang-up to
destabilise her government is a matter of mystery.

What is not bewildering is the fact that the Chief
Minister has unwittingly borrowed the language and the imagery of the very Left
she claims to despise. The incessant talk of conspiracies is so reminiscent of
a Left which had grown up on a diet of counter-revolutionary paranoia.
Conspiracy or ‘chakranta’ was a favourite term of the Stalin lovers who spent
the first two decades of Left Front rule declaiming against a diabolical
Centre.

Likewise, the social boycott of the CPI(M) that Mamata
has begun advocating is borrowed almost entirely from her Communist foes. The
cadre raj that was unleashed in Bengal by the CPI(M) did not always generate
physical violence. The strategy of the comrades also consisted of enforcing
social ostracism of a target, denying him labour, livelihood and community
services till the point where the victim either left the locality or grovelled
before the party Local Committee. For the Left, which believed in a total
control of society, social boycott was a lethal and effective weapon. It
yielded results but it was also responsible for the anti-Left backlash that
found expression after the Lok Sabha election of 2009.

It is this unthinking drift to copy-cat Leftist
politics that is at the heart of Mamata’s woes. Sometime in the early-1990s,
Mamata arrived at the conclusion that the old-style blend of bhadralok and
jotedar (petty landlord) politics would not suffice to oust the Left. Like the
Congress of Siddharth Shankar Ray that matched Left-wing extremism of the CPI(M)
and Naxalites with Indira Gandhi’s radical rhetoric, Mamata chose to beat the
Left at its own game. It paid rich dividends and her unrelenting opposition to
muscular land acquisition in Nandigram and Singur secured for her the support
of Left-inclined intellectuals who glorify poverty and loath development.

No doubt the CPI(M)’s
loss of monopoly control over Leftist rhetoric played a role in the electoral
transformation of Bengal. But where Mamata seems to have miscalculated is in
believing that the cussedness and obstructive ways of the Left is a source of
inspiration to Bengal. That may have been the case a decade ago but the
poriborton people voted for in 2011 was meant to usher in liberation from
economic stagnation and despondency. Mamata doesn’t seem to realise she is
going the way of the Left.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

It was former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao who
is credited with the view that crisis management often involves doing
absolutely nothing. However, unlike the present occupant of 7 Race Course Road
who falls back on inaction because he is powerless to do anything, Rao’s
passivity was often pre-meditated and born out of careful calculation.

It is entirely possible that the prevarication that
led to the BJP leadership persisting with Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ in
Uttarakhand till six months before the polls was born out of a similar careful
calculation. It was, however, such a complex calculation that that its logic by
passed the ordinary voters of the state.
The voters of Uttarakhand could never understand the rationale of the BJP
playing political football with a leader of such extraordinary standing as
General B.C. Khanduri.

The possible reasons why the BJP preferred
management by inaction in Uttarakhand for as long as it did are open to
interpretation. Casual observers can only presume that Nishank’s great skills
of survival had little to do with pilgrimage holidays for leaders and their
families, and his ability to keep a few relevant people happy.

The Uttarakhand experience is relevant today because
for some compelling reasons the BJP seems determined to repeat the process in
Karnataka—a state where drift, mismanagement and incompetence appear to have
become the defining features of the state government’s political management.

Arguably, it is not a problem of the party’s own
making. Had it not been for a completely motivated and erroneous judgment by
former state Lokayukta and Team Anna activist Santosh Hegde, the popularly
elected Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa would have been in place. After all,
the BJP had won the Assembly election in 2008 by projecting Yeddyurappa as its
chief ministerial candidate. The Lokayukta verdict of nepotism against
Yeddyurappa forced his resignation in July 2011 and his replacement by the
amiable but political lightweight Sadanand Gowda. The understanding was that
Yeddyurappa would reclaim his chief ministerial position once he had cleared
his name in the courts.

It stands to reason that after Yeddyurappa was
cleared by the High Court of the tendentious charges levelled at him by the
Lokayukta that he would want his job back. For the BJP too, Yeddyurappa’s exoneration
(and the corresponding removal of some of the party’s rotten apples from
Bellary) should have come as a great relief. In the past six months, Sadanand
Gowda had proved unequal to the task of managing the state. His lack of
political standing came in the way of being able to balance and manage
conflicting interests in a state where a spectacular real estate and mining
boom helped fuel corruption on a grand scale.

Just as each extra day of a venal Nishank government
added to the disrepute of the BJP in Uttarakhand, persisting with a weak and
politically inept Sadanand Gowda administration has been damaging the BJP with
every passing day. The Chief Minister’s inability to retain the
Udipi-Chikmagalur Lok Sabha seat (which he had vacated) for the BJP candidate
spoke volumes about his own standing in the state. Every indication pointed to
the need for Yeddyurappa to resume from where he had left off.

With the majority of the BJP MLAs and the MPs from
Karnataka reposing faith in Yeddyurappa, there were no political obstacles to
the restoration. The question, therefore, arises: why has Yeddyurappa not been
reinstated as yet? Why does uncertainty persist over the future of Karnataka
which allows people to fish in troubled waters?

The answer, ironically, lies in the BJP
Parliamentary Board, the supreme decision-making body of the party which
behaved so generously towards Nishank and which is now showing its
unwillingness to have Yeddyurappa at the helm in Bengaluru. The peculiar
feature of the Parliamentary Board is that it does not matter what the majority
thinks. What matters is that a determined minority can block decisions and
force the party into a state of indecisiveness. That is what happened with
Nishank: his removal was doggedly resisted by venerable veterans till the
bitter end. Today, Yeddyurappa’s reinstallation is being opposed by the same
quarter for reasons that are difficult to comprehend.

What is happening is utterly bewildering. The
democratic wishes of an entire state party and the overwhelming majority of its
elected MPs and MLAs are being subverted because there is a veto in Delhi. The
BJP doesn’t move until there is total agreement of its members or until the
President puts his foot down and forces a decision. With Nitin Gadkari
insufficiently strong to press a decision, the collective wishes of the
Karnataka party are being subverted by just two individuals in Delhi.

In the past this high command culture in the
Congress had given birth to severe distortions and destroyed the umbrella
character of the party. In the past two years, the Congress High Command’s
inability to stomach the choice of MLAs in Andhra Pradesh had triggered the
rebellion of Jagan Mohan Reddy. A similar situation in West Bengal had led to
Mamata Banerjee’s departure from the parent party in 1996.

The Congress and BJP
are different parties. However, the impression that there are BJP leaders
determined to force Yeddyurappa into a corner and compel him to form a regional
party is too compelling to disregard. The BJP’s slow demise in Karnataka is a
case study in political self-destruction.

Friday, April 13, 2012

There are politicians who acquire fame because of
the media; there are others who thrive in public life despite it. In recent
times, few politicians have been the subject of sustained scrutiny and
unrelenting media hostility as Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Ever since
Gujarat was gripped by large-scale communal rioting following the arson attack
on kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya by the Sabarmati Express in February 2002,
Modi has been relentlessly pilloried by an alliance of activists, leftists,
liberals and the media for his supposed role in the disturbances. Indeed, in
certain circles it has become obligatory to describe him as a ‘butcher’, a
‘mass murderer’ and to banish him from membership of the human race.

So it was last Tuesday when the findings of the
report of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigations Team were made
known to a Magistrate’s court in Ahmedabad. No sooner was it known that the SIT
had found no evidence to recommend the criminal prosecution of Modi in the
Gulberg Housing Society killings than a vocal section of the media began giving
full play to the activists who had doggedly pursued the case. The
English-language TV which has taken paid-up membership of the jihad against
Modi couched its indignation over the SIT findings with broad hints that the
report had wilfully overlooked evidence.

The disappointment over this most recent failure to
‘nail’ Modi is understandable. Ever since he turned the tables on his opponents
by equating the vicious personal attacks to the vilification of Gujarat, the
opponents of the Gujarat Chief Minister have more or less abandoned serious
attempts to defeat him in an electoral encounter. Instead, the anti-Modi
campaign has concentrated its energies on getting judicial strictures passed
against him and thereby disqualifying him from the electoral battle altogether.

The legal battles were complemented by a larger
campaign to project Modi as an extremist, not only within his own party but in
society. After the US decision to deny him a visa, the anti-Modi campaign
sought to portray the Chief Minister as a narrow-minded and self-centred bigot.
Even if Modi reigned supreme in Gujarat, he would be regarded as a pariah in
the rest of the country and, indeed, the world.

The campaign yielded some results. In the election
of 2004, for example, a subterranean mobilisation using the imagery of the
riots in the Muslim clusters of northern and eastern India was responsible for
the en-bloc minority vote against the National Democratic Alliance. Today, the
argument that the presence of Modi would trigger a monumental gang-up of
disparate forces opposed to him is preventing the Bharatiya Janata Party from
giving the Chief Minister a larger role in national politics.

There was another unstated agenda. Writing in the Guardian in November 2005, shortly after
President George W. Bush had appointed a number of conservative judges to the
US Supreme Court, the American feminist writer Naomi Wolf had had argued that
Washington society would blunt the rough edges of their proclivities. The
judges, she wrote, “are people who live in and cannot help but respond to the
bigger cultural shifts of their time. I believe in the power of this cultural
shift around us to move even the judiciary: Institutions are made up of human
beings, and no one likes being looked at with contempt at dinner parties.”

The fear of being shunned socially does affect
professional decision-making. In a polemically astute study of “how the Left
lost its way” published in 2007, British journalist Nick Cohen addressed a
larger question: why is the media guided by the herd instinct? Citing a study
by the Columbia Journalism Review on why reporters practice self-censorship,
Cohen arrived at an interesting conclusion: peer pressure. “What matters to
most people in work is the status accumulated by the approval of colleagues. If
the pack is howling off in one direction, very few journalists want to break
ranks and head off on their own.”

A reason why a recent Time cover featuring Modi (in its Asia edition) and favourable
reports by the Sydney Morning Herald, Brookings Institute and Washington Post
generated so much chatter was the domestic media outrage over foreign
journalists defying the prevailing ‘groupthink’.

So sustained has been the political and media
onslaught against Modi that lesser beings would have wilted. The irony is that
far from destroying Modi politically and reducing him to the fringe status of,
say, Alabama’s George Wallace or France’s Jean Marie Le Pen, he is being
increasingly seen as the Indian equivalent of Vladimir Putin—loathed and
despised by some but hailed as a necessary strong man by others. If opinion
polls are any guide, his appeal outside Gujarat is steadily rising.

Modi’s ability to survive this sustained ordeal owes
considerably to his ability to gradually shift the terms of discourse. There is
little doubt that in the Assembly election of 2002, held barely nine months
after the bloodletting, Modi projected himself as an upholder of an assertive
Gujarati Hindu identity. However, since that election he has focussed
single-mindedly on economic growth and improving the quality of governance in
the state. His no-nonsense style, ruthless attachment to efficiency and his
reputation for incorruptibility has been contrasted to a political class that
has yet to fully grasp the implications of economic resurgence on public life. Without
his tangible achievement in making Gujarat the fastest growing state of the
Indian Union and his ability to translate that success electorally, Modi would
have been a pushover in the face of the very powerful forces pitted against
him.

Modi did not confront his detractors headlong over
the 2002 riots; he chose to outflank them by creating a parallel constituency
based on his awesome record in governance.

If the SIT report has the potential of ending all
speculation over the personal culpability of the Chief Minister in the riots,
its timing could not have been more opportune. The post-riots inquisition has
not influenced the polls in Gujarat since 2002 and the Assembly election
scheduled for the end of the year will probably be no different. Gujarati
society is inclined to look upon the 2002 events as a nightmare that must not
be allowed to recur. There is a perception that old wounds must not reappear and
vitiate the atmosphere. By refusing to compartmentalise the Gujarati people
into communal blocs, Modi has played to this general desire to move on and
focus on livelihood.

However, the SIT report is calculated to play a role
outside Gujarat. First, it is certain to lead to a clamour within the
dispirited BJP to accord a greater national role to Modi after he once again
proves his mettle in Gujarat later this year. Secondly, with Manmohan Singh
floundering and Rahul Gandhi yet to demonstrate his leadership skills, the
Indian Establishment has begun to scour the landscape for a leader with the
capacity to check drift and address governance in a purposeful way. Modi’s name
as the man India awaits is already being spoken in hushed tones. If it is now
demonstrated that there are no legal obstacles to his political career, it is
entirely possible that the whisper could become an echo—in the same way as
Vajpayee’s did after 1996.

This is not to
suggest that the formidable opposition to Modi will wilt. On the contrary, we
may witness a hardening of positions and an increase in the decibel levels of
shrillness—sure signs that those who once dominated the discourse are now
threatened and vulnerable. Sooner rather than later, the media too will begin
to hum a different tune.

Sunday, April 08, 2012

It is easy for historians, writing with the benefit
of hindsight, to identify the roots of developments that subsequently evolve
into a ‘crisis’. For contemporaries, however, long-term trends are more
difficult to detect, and in the Made in Media age the inclination to equate
individual trees for the wood is often irresistible.

In 2004, prior to a general election it imagined was
already won, the BJP projected itself as the “natural party of government” and
targeted 300 Lok Sabha seats. Today, after a long bout of incoherence stemming
from unending factional battles, it faces the ignominy of being dubbed the Big
Joke Party by a reputable international publication.

In 2009, the Congress emerged from an election few expected
would yield a clear outcome, with a tally of 206 seats. The 2009 verdict
convinced the party leadership it was on a comeback trail—one that would fulfil
its grand dream of governing India with a clear majority of its own. Today,
after a series of humiliating election defeats, it is shell shocked and
blundering from one crisis to another.

For the commentariat, the two parallel developments
signal the ‘crisis’ of the national parties, with no clear indication of what
is to come in its place. For the parties, however, dejection hasn’t triggered soul
searching. The Congress still believes that with Rahul Gandhi as its mascot, a
bagful of mega welfare schemes and the magic of secularism, it will somehow crawl
back to power again. After all, assert Congress loyalists cockily, the nation
is always bigger than the sum of all its states.

An equally smug BJP believes that a
generously-funded campaign centred on anti-incumbency will allow the NDA to be
in a position to attract post-poll allies and cross the hump. The saffron
generals aren’t needlessly bothered by their lack of a big idea, their
inability to attract new talent, their wariness of their star leader from
Gujarat and the sleaze factor within. In a two horse race, they believe, their
pony will outpace the injured Congress stallion.

It is possible that either of these scenarios will
play out in the summer of 2012 or even earlier. But that doesn’t negate the
fact that both pan-Indian parties are in deep crisis for reasons they have not
been able to yet comprehend.

Since the Crown replaced the Company in 1858, India
has been taught to believe that a strong Centre is a precondition to peace and
prosperity. A firm but benign dispensation in Delhi has been projected as the maa-baap sarkar. Earlier, this system of
paternalism offered peremptory justice, famine relief and protection from
thugees and marauders. Today, blessed with bewildering acronyms, it also promises
100 days of work, subsidised foodgrain and other ‘entitlements’. On the face of
it, Incredible India has remained Timeless India—interspersed with Bollywood,
cricket and mobile phones. Or at least that’s the caricature the babalogs fondly
believe as they navigate their SUVs into their constituencies. The rule is simple: smart casual in Delhi and meeting ka kapda—as a venerable Bengali
barrister politician called it—in the boon docks.

But amid the timelessness, something else is also
happenings. In just two decades, India has witnessed more encapsulated growth
(albeit uneven) than the past century taken together. Prosperity, education,
information, mobility and rising expectations have changed the Indian mentality
profoundly. There is an air of impatience which has translated into a greater
concern for the quality of life, not in abstraction, but in their localities. A
strengthened democracy is witnessing a relative disinterest in the nation and a
greater identification with the regions. Patriotism hasn’t eroded, but among
the rising elites and local notables there is unconcern and indifference to
Delhi.

This is what happened in the US, as prosperity
strengthened localism. The phenomenon is being replicated in India. What is a
‘crisis’ today is waiting to become an opportunity.

There is a
constituency anxious to express its exasperation with the remote control of the
metropolitan elite. With their high commands and controlled leadership
structures, the national parties are living in a make-believe Beltway. They
have a choice: to either reshape themselves into loose coalitions of state
interests or live out their unitarian fantasies in irrelevance.

Last Thursday and Friday, reinvigorated after nearly
a month-long absence from public life, Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi
undertook a necessary chore: he presided over an in-camera inquest. Ideally,
the hearings should have been held in Lucknow, the scene of the debacle.
However, since the defeat was also viewed as evidence of the people’s perfidy, the
choice of Delhi was inevitable. In this age of democracy where people rise
above their station, it isn’t possible to denounce the underlings as “sacks of
potatoes”, as Karl Marx did. But the snub to UP was there for all to see.

It is early to say whether or not the regulated
bloodletting over two days served any tangible purpose. Congress politicians
are astute beings. They know there is a Lakshman rekha they cannot cross. Like
salesmen appearing before the top boss to explain their failure to meet sales
targets, they can at best point an accusing finger at their zonal supervisors.
They will not say that the overall marketing strategy was all wrong and, worse,
that the product they were to sell was flawed and had few takers. The owner can
never be wrong; he is invariably let down by unworthy underlings.

Consequently, if media reports are anything to go
by, Rahul has promised to take firm action against the errant and redouble
efforts to bolster the party organisation—to which Rahul had been devoting his
unceasing attention since 2009. The template prescription is reminiscent of
what Theodre H. White, the chronicler of US presidential elections had to say
about Senator Barry Goldwater’s disastrous performance against President Lyndon
Johnson in 1964: “The organisation of Goldwater’s campaign in Washington and
across the country was absolutely first class, except that it reminded one of
the clay mock-ups of the new models in Detroit’s automobile industry. It was
meticulously designed, hand-sanded, striking in appearance—but it had no
motor.”

In today’s context, the lack of a motor is the
equivalent of not possessing a big idea. Apart from suggesting that young
people should join politics, that good people should join politics, that Nandan
Nilekani’s magic wand will do away with all the imperfections of the money ‘we’
dole out from Delhi and that the blood of Indira Gandhi runs through his veins,
there is very little that Rahul has to offer either the country or the voters
of any state. There may be a certain charm to saying the same thing from
Kashmir to Kannyakumari but if the overall message is anodyne, it is hardly
surprising that it falls flat.

Perhaps Rahul should start addressing some of the
issues that agitate most Indians: the state of the economy, the problems of
corruption, the pressures of federalism, the Naxalite menace, environmental
concerns and India’s place in the world. He also needs to address questions about
the UPA Government. He can hardly pretend that the Congress is detached from
the Government it heads.

Rahul has been tutored on these subjects and more by
some of India’s most famous Congress-inclined intellectuals. It’s time he
unveiled the results of his learning. It may actually help Indians to assess
the basis of the Congress’ projection of him as India’s next prime minister.

Yet, and to be fair, Rahul has at least tried in his
limited way to address concerns arising from the Congress’ poor performance in
UP last month. At least the crestfallen Congress candidates who travelled to
Delhi last week can have the satisfaction of knowing that there was someone to
listen to their tales of woe and, maybe, even do something about it. Allowing
activists the space to let off steam is one of the functions of leadership. To
that limited extent, Rahul has fulfilled an elementary obligation.

The same can hardly be said of the BJP leadership
which has reacted to the defeat in UP, the setback in Uttarakhand and the loss
of seats in Punjab by doing absolutely nothing. Even without the benefit of any
organised feedback, the BJP appears to have blamed its failure in UP to the
very same factors that the Congress identified: lack of organisational rigour,
internal faction fights, uninspiring local leadership and the failure to emerge
as a credible alternative. And like the Congress, it has also conveniently
sidestepped the issue of the lack of a big picture.

If the electorate is clueless as to what Rahul
stands for, it is equally mystified about what the BJP is all about. Like
misguided Keynesians who imagine that digging holes constitute productive
endeavour, a section of the BJP seems to believe that activity for its own sake
constitutes good politics. An even more deluded section seems to further
believe that generous funding alone can win elections—a belief that has blunted
the edge of the party campaign against the Congress’ mega-sleaze. There is just
no concern about the fact that there has been no consequential flow of new
blood into the party (except perhaps in Gujarat and Goa) since 2004. Rahul has
at least tried to get new people interested in politics; the BJP has been
content being a self-perpetuating cabal.

For both the national parties, the crisis is not of
organisation shortcoming and factional restlessness. These are the consequences
of the failure to grasp that ideas (as opposed to doctrinaire ideology) have a
role in politics.

In India, there is a
new rule of politics that is fast emerging: Nothing succeeds like failure.

Friday, April 06, 2012

There are two terms the keep recurring in the
chatter over the drama surrounding the recent actions of the Army chief General
V.K. Singh: ‘sadness’ and ‘concern’ verging on ‘anger’.

There is the ritual expression of sadness that any
controversy surrounding the armed forces and particularly the Army chief should
have become a subject of public discourse. There is sadness that a Defence
Minister with a reputation for saintliness should have become embroiled in a
controversy that implicitly involves sleaze.

At the same time, there is concern over the fate of
a national institution that must remain above partisan politics. Yet the
concern spills over into outright anger at the mere suggestion that General
Singh is at odds with retired officers and the civilian-controlled Ministry of
Defence. “Does General Singh think he’s in Pakistan?” asked former National
Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, articulating the rage of the High Church of
the Indian Establishment, “He’s gone berserk. In a democracy the civilian
authority is in charge.” Equally lofty concerns were articulated by sections of
the media that charged the General with waging war on India and even plotting
an extremely amateurish coup.

In a strictly Constitutional sense the anger of a
high-minded Establishment is understandable. It would be a sad day if senior
officers of the armed forces function without regard to the elected government.
In the past, allegations of unilateralism were levelled against General
Thimayya, General Sundarji and Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat. With the exception of
Admiral Bhagwat who was peremptorily sacked, the differences involving Generals
Thimayya and Sundarji were not allowed to come to a head. With a grasp of
politics that is in keeping with contemporary realities, Defence Minister A.K.
Antony too has preferred a more conciliatory approach than many of the hotheads
who demanded General Singh’s head on a platter.

Antony’s cautious approach appears to have been
guided by both pragmatic and ethical considerations. He knew, for example, that
an already beleaguered government could not afford a fresh controversy,
particularly one that involved charges of possible fiscal improprieties. With
only a couple of months left for General Singh to demit office, he felt it far
more prudent to grin and bear it.

But Antony is more than just a politician with a
reputation for playing it safe. As one of the few practitioners of ethical
politics in the system, he was aware of two things. First, that despite the
unorthodox manner in which General Singh brought the Rs 14-crore bribe offer to
the public attention, the Army chief was essentially a soldier with a fierce
attachment to old-school values such as honour and uprightness. Secondly, the
Defence Minister was also aware that General Singh’s misgivings over the army’s
purchase of Tatra trucks were real. Finally, Antony must have come to know that
the leak of General Singh’s letter to the Prime Minister on the lack of defence
preparedness was not the doing of the chief Army chief.

Whether Antony is aware of the identity of the
person who leaked the letter, hoping the blame would be laid at the door of
General Singh, is a matter of conjecture. What is however curious is that even
after Antony ordered a CBI inquiry into possible foul play in the purchase of
Tatra trucks and began work to streamline and hasten the pace of
decision-making in defence purchases, the intensity of the offensive against
General Singh doubled. Why, for example, have various bodies rushed in to
gratuitously offer certificates of good health to the Tatra? Why is there an
attempt to suggest that General Singh is more than just a painfully
self-righteous man? That he is in fact capable of attempting a coup?

There is an old Chinese saying “When the finger
points to the moon, the idiot points to the finger”. When General Singh pointed
to something strange about the pricing of military vehicles and the dependence
on just one supplier for over 26 years, why was there a desperate attempt to
shift the terms of the debate and focus on the supposed madness of General
Singh? Has General Singh unwittingly stirred a hornet’s nest?

There is a section of a very rotten Delhi
Establishment that has come to interpret civilian control over the armed forces
as the freedom of the military and Defence Ministry to be completely outside
the realm of public scrutiny. Since defence is a matter of national concern and
accounts for the largest head of expenditure in the Union Budget, this is an
unacceptable proposition. Operational autonomy should not be detached from an
overall sense of budgetary accountability.

Equally unacceptable is the suggestion that the
public intrusiveness that accompanied the purchase of Bofors guns in 1986-7 was
responsible for the procrastination that has marked the purchase of defence
hardware, particularly in the past decade. The problem with the Bofors guns was
not about quality but centred on the issue of price. Did the Indian exchequer
pay too much and was the mark-up a result of kickbacks? This question is also
at the heart of the Tatra truck deal where the buffer role of a public sector
unit deserves closer scrutiny.

By pretending that
these questions are mala-fide, the Indian Establishment has demonstrated that
it is unwilling to address the very issues that agitate civil society. General
Singh has asked the right questions. We now await the credible answers.

About Me

The Right is an endangered community in India's English-language media. I happen to be one of the few to have retained a precarious toehold in the mainstream media. I intend this blog as a sounding board of ideas and concerns.
You can read the details of my education, professional experience and political inclinations on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swapan_Dasgupta).
RIGHT ANGLE is an archive of my published articles. USUAL SUSPECTS is my blog.